Heorhiy Shabayev

Heorhiy Shabayev was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with Ukrainian Supreme Court Judge with Russian Citizenship.

Heorhiy Shabayev, 26, is a journalist with Schemes (Skhemy), an investigative news project run by RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service. He is a graduate of the Institute of Journalism at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and the author of a dozen investigations into corruption in the government, the construction industry, and in large state-owned enterprises.

After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, he focused on the identification of Russian war criminals and the methods by which Russia tries to circumvent US and European Union sanctions. He was the first to report on Russia’s destruction of the world’s largest AN-225 Mriya aircraft at the Gostomel airfield in the Kyiv region. Also, he was the first to report the death of a Russian midshipman on the cruiser Moskva in April 2022, which was widely reported by the world media.

In 2021 he entered the list of 30 journalists under 30 years old who are creating the future of Ukrainian media according to the Heorhiy Gongadze award. Shabayev lives and works in Kyiv.

Cathrin Kahlweit

Cathrin Kahlweit was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with To Hell and Back. 

Cathrin Kahlweit was born in 1959 in Göttingen, Lower Saxony. She studied Russian and Political Science at the University of Oregon (USA), at the Universities of Tübingen and Göttingen (Germany) and at the Pushkin Institute (USSR) – and finished her MA in 1985.

After two years of further education at Henri-Nannen School of Journalism in Hamburg she worked freelance for TV-stations and magazines, before she joined the staff of Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), one of the biggest national daily papers in Germany. 

Kahlweit has been an editor, reporter and correspondent for SZ for more than 30 years now, covering mainly Central and Eastern Europe and foreign politics. She worked in Frankfurt and Berlin and, as a foreign correspondent, in Vienna and London, traveling and writing about Brexit and the UK for three years, and about Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary and Austria for more than ten years now.

Kahlweit has three grown up children and wrote six books – not only about politics.